Manga A Day: Dokebi Bride Vol 4

Amazon.com: Dokebi Bride Vol. 4: Books: Marley ISBN: 1600090788 ISBN-13: 9781600090783

It randomly annoys me that Amazon doesn't have the cover for Dokebi Bride vol three on file, but they do have four. Anyway, volume four takes a sudden jump in time from volume three. At the end of three Sunbi had secured a dokebi, Gwangsoo, to help her fend off the evil wandering spirits that were trying to posses her. Things didn't got as planned.

Now it's several months past her arrival in Seoul, she's graduated from 10th grade and is in the 11th. After a bit of trickery to scare her teacher off her case, Sunbi has been spending most of her time clubbing and avoiding everyone. Her only friend remains the nerdy Taehoon. In fact most of her classmates suspect she might be prostituting herself because of the many new clothes and things she walks around with. Actually, she's been getting gold from all of Gwangsoo's dokebi friends. They pay her to get things like soju (a cheap common liquor), crackers and buckweat jelly, or just to stare at her face for a while.

You'd think being rich and having nothing important to do with her time would make a teenage girl happy, but Sunbi remains a bitter pill. She still manages to get tormented by ghosts and since she argues with Gwangsoo he's not even very willing to help her. Plus, her family thinks she's nuts and tricks her into seeing a psychologist. I feel strangely sympathetic to her family, her stepmother, stepsister and father. They obviously have no idea how to connect with her. They make clumsy overtures but Sunbi is so determined to stand on her own that she continually pushes them away.

Sunbi is slowing gaining connections in town however, running into the professor who studies Dokebi myths she met briefly in volume two. I like the professor character and her friend Taehoon, but I know every time they show up we're going to have another info dump on either Korean myth, metaphysics, or some sort of mystic phenomenon. There are sections of the four books like this where the story just stops and they go into a page or two of exposition, but it's especially heavy in this volume.

The story doesn't advance much, but the story remains an engaging mix of drama, horror and comedy that you don't mind too much. The artwork really deserves a post of it's own because I want to scan in a few pages. Tomorrow I'll post on Dokebi Bride vol 5 (the last one I have, so I'll finally move on), and talk about the artwork.